Dolphin Whisperer Could Help Us Talk To E.T.

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For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have
been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member
pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.

Understanding the relationships between the members of the pod is
key to unraveling what their dozens of whistles, clicks and other
signals mean.

"The large goal of this project is to tell the story of what it's
like to be a dolphin," Herzing, a researcher with Florida
Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the
Wild Dolphin Project, told Discovery News.

That got her thinking about creating a rudimentary communications
system, so that the dolphins, for example could ask for a
particular toy. Two-way communication with dolphins has been
attempted various times over the years, but never with a group of
animals in the wild.

The research has implications in the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, or SETI, with the dolphins standing in as a sort of
E.T. analog.

"The idea is 'how do you recognize intelligence?' That's why
people test dolphins and primates in captivity, to try to measure
their cognitive skills, their abilities, how they use their
minds," Herzing said.

"If you ever got to some place (with a non-technological but
potentially intelligent species), how would you recognize it
and how might you establish some communicative repertoire?" she
said. "There's a lot of species on this planet that we can
probably learn from as models."

"It's kind of like making a time-exposure photo of a city at
night. Because you build up the light, you can't see the faint
stuff, like the stoplights changing, because the (picture)
exposure is longer than the time it took for them to change,"
said radio astronomer Seth Shostak, with the SETI Institute in
Mountain View, Calif.

"But the basic idea is sound. You don't want to be too
self-centered in your work," he said. "You have a lab for
studying other kinds of intelligence right here on Earth.
That was talked about 50 years ago and it's still a good idea
today."

Herzing is continuing to refine the technology for two-way
communication with dolphins. The prototype used an underwater
keyboard and props such as balls and scarves that were labeled
with symbols and paired with a whistle sound the dolphins could
replicate. Her research is under review for publication.